The board of Coffee Day Enterprises, parent of coffee chain Cafe Coffee Day, met a day after its chairman VG Siddhartha went missing in what is being seen as a suicide case.
"The Board is confident that the professional management of the company and each of the entities in the Coffee Day Group and their respective leadership team, will ensure continuity of all business operations consistent with past behaviour," the board said in a statement following the emergency meeting.
"In the interim, the board is evaluating and assessing the situation, formulating appropriate steps to ensure business operations are unaffected, and has resolved to co-operate with authorities," it added.
The Coffee Day board has five members, not including Siddhartha. They are Malavika Hegde, Siddhartha's wife, SV Ranganath, a retired IAS officer, Sanjay Omprakash Nayar, non-executive director and CEO of PE firm KKR India, Independent Director Albert Hieronimus, and Sulakshana Raghavan, an Independent Director and MD of Landor.
The board will meet again on July 31 at 10.30 am. Siddhartha's wife Hegde is unlikely to attend.
The immediate task in front of the board would be to select an interim chairman in the absence of VG Siddhartha and chart out the future course for the company.
"In this hour of need, we are counting on the support and strength of all our stakeholders including employees, customers, lenders, contractual counterparties, media, and well-wishers and request all to keep their morale high," the board said.
Siddhartha has gone missing from Monday evening after he stopped his car near the Netravati river bridge in Mangaluru and asked his driver to proceed without him.
He also wrote what seems to be an apparent suicide letter to the company board and to Coffee Day employees, saying that he had "failed to create the right profitable business model" and that he was giving up due to pressure from investors, borrowers and after having been troubled by issues with the tax department.
The authenticity of the question has not been verified.
Authorities have launched a massive search operation looking for Siddhartha.
Coffee Day has struggled under a massive debt burden even as Siddhartha was also under the lens of tax authority for transactions including a stake sale in IT firm Mindtree.
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